The attraction of cellulosic ethanol is that it is made from agricultural and forestry waste materials rather than crops grown to produce fuel. That, its promoters hope, will allow it to escape the food-versus-fuel debate that has plagued ethanol made from corn and other crops, said the report.
Iogen, which also is supplying the ethanol for Shell's month-long promotion, uses enzymes to break down wheat straw and make about 60,000 liters of ethanol a month at its demonstration plant in Ottawa.
In an interview following the Shell news conference, Brian Foody, Iogen's president and CEO, acknowledged that some of the production not needed by Iogen in the past for testing has gone into the pool of ethanol used for gasoline blending.
"There have been molecules from our plant that have made their way into cars," Foody told the newspaper.
But executives at MacEwen, which was once a major Iogen customer, said they were a bit surprised, and somewhat amused, by the claims from Iogen and Shell. When Ottawa hosted the 2004 Grey Cup, the Canadian Football League's championship, MacEwen and Iogen offered a weeklong, cellulosic ethanol promotion at a station in downtown Ottawa.
MacEwen was an early promoter in Canada of ethanol-blended gasoline, the report said. Marcel Labelle, the company's vice president of sales and supply, told the paper, "We were particularly careful about putting only their product in" the gasoline sold at that station's ethanol blend pumps.
The effort was publicized in a news release (click here), and official Grey Cup vehicles, which were fueled at the MacEwen station, bore photos of wheat straw, the Iogen logo and the slogan: "Fueled with low CO2 cellulose ethanol."
Outside of that promotion, Labelle said that MacEwen regularly purchased most of Iogen's production during 2004 and 2005 and blended it, at varying levels, into gasoline.
"When we were doing this, the major oil companies wouldn't touch ethanol," Labelle told the Times. "It was taking refined product out of their system. They've been caught out. And I'm sure Shell doesn't want to be embarrassed."
Kirsten Smart, a spokesperson at Royal Dutch Shell in London, qualified for the Times the company's earlier claim in an e-mail message on Friday: "We believe this is the first customer offering where over a month-long period consumers can knowingly purchase gasoline with a 10% blend of cellulosic ethanol, and the first time it has been actively marketed."
Phil von Finckenstein, a spokesperson for Iogen, added that MacEwen only offered "a low-level blend" in 2004, not the 10% cellulosic mix now on sale at Shell. He added that the pumps were primarily for Grey Cup vehicles. "The public was happenstance if they got the fuel," Finckenstein said.
Labelle, after consulting company records, agreed that early customers may have received slightly less than 10% cellulosic ethanol because there initially was some residual gasoline blended with corn ethanol in the station's storage tanks. But that gas station is replenished more than once a week, he said. So many motorists received gasoline only blended with cellulosic ethanol.
Iogen, Labelle said, has approached MacEwen about supplying ethanol for a pump at the downtown station that sells an 85% ethanol blend, which is used mostly by federal government vehicles. If something comes of those talks, Labelle said he expected the cellulose marketing machinery to kick in again.
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